Buff Enzyme Missile

[DemiserofD]

The Enzyme Missile is fun, but totally useless. It's worse than a class 1 gimballed pulse laser. An unengineered class 1 pulse laser.

But there's a simple solution!

Buff its damage to standard missile damage(50).

Change its primary damage type to Caustic.

That's it!

Now, rather than being a sucky missile with a sucky effect that only works on armor, it's an almost absolute missile with good ammo reserves and a bonus secondary effect dot burn. It will be worse against normal enemies, but quite good against engineered enemies, just like plasma type weapons.

I think it would be decent, but not overpowered, and something you might see used somewhat regularly!

 

[Stabby_Dave]

Might need a bit less damage than standard to compensate for the caustic effect, but in theory, yeah.

Atm, I don't know anyone that uses them.

 

[Kzak]

Alternative: Allow the caustic effect to stack, up to a certain number of stacks.

 

[Coehoorn]

Alternative: Don't support terrorism.

 

[Screemonster]

Allow it to apply its caustic through shields.
It still won't do as much DPS as a standard hardpoint but it'd at least be a way to annoy shieldtanks that skipped hull day. On a par with a phasing weapon.

 

[Screemonster]

Alternative: Don't support terrorism.

You are aware that enzyme missiles existed before the NMLA storyline, right? Get your finger-wagging out of this balance discussion.

 

[DemiserofD]

Allow it to apply its caustic through shields.
It still won't do as much DPS as a standard hardpoint but it'd at least be a way to annoy shieldtanks that skipped hull day. On a par with a phasing weapon.

I thought about that, but the trouble is, phasing isn't really any good on its own, anyway. Even if the caustic effect could pierce shields, it would still just be phasing without the default weapon too, which is still terrible.

I'd be game for, say, 30-40 caustic impact damage and shield piercing, though. I just think that you could go all the way to 50 and still be relatively balanced.

 

[whothe]

or allow its premium ammo to be synth'd using thargoid mats ( which atm have no use afaik ) to increase caustic damage to a not laughable level of damage?

The thargoid mats to increase the damage effect could make it useful, but mats will have to be farmed. ofc there would need to be a balance of weapon damage vs material collection that the person firing these is not going to just spam them indifferently. Yes they would be a powerful weapon against a beefy shield tank if using premium ammo but with the right balance the premium ammo would be used sparingly, the rest of the time theyd be on par with regular dumbfires so as not to make actually equipping the hardpoint a complete waste of space.

Interceptor and scout tissue samples, scavenger materials, thargoid hearts and technology drops. Idk maybe there is some future content they have pegged for using some of this stuff down the road at some point?